


A Line of Stones

by TehanuFromEarthsea



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dejarik, Desert Island Fic, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Kylo Ren Redemption, May contain traces of shellfish, Recovery, Reylo - Freeform, Stranded on Ahch-To
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 13:39:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10023104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehanuFromEarthsea/pseuds/TehanuFromEarthsea
Summary: When Kylo's ship crashes on Ahch-To and Luke takes off in the Millennium Falcon, Rey and Kylo must find a way to co-exist.*          *            *





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onstraysod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/gifts).



> Onstraysod gave me a prompt for the Ring in the Reylo Fiction Exchange. While she said she liked what I wrote her, it was nothing like what she asked for! This, I hope, is a little closer.
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

Rey was hardly surprised when Kylo used the Force to divide their island in two. He could be childish like that.

The previous day they’d fought to their usual draw after chasing each other all around the island. They’d stood, panting, on either side of the rocks that formed a low crest at the peak of the island.

Rey gestured with her lightsaber. “Why don’t you _stay_ over there, on that side. And I’ll stay on this side.”

She _could_ go on fighting. And so could he. They might even succeed in lopping off each other’s limbs. But what was the point, really? Both of them had orders to capture the other one alive, it seemed, or the whole fiasco would have been over already.

Neither of them had the advantage. They were both stuck here with no way off, ever since Kylo’s disastrous arrival weeks ago.

Rey had been asleep. She’d jumped out of bed, just in time to see the Falcon engaged in a tremendous dogfight with Kylo’s ship. At the end of it, Kylo had crashed onto the island, crippling his ship beyond any possibility of repair. Instead of landing, Luke had taken the Millennium Falcon shrieking up into the sky and out of sight. A pinpoint flash of ice-blue light marked its jump into hyperspace.

“Look who’s been abandoned again,” said Kylo, when he’d staggered out of the wreckage, angry as a Mandalorian hornet and holding his lightsaber at the ready. (The same one, or another of an equally stupid design. She couldn’t tell.)

Kylo’s words struck right at the heart of Rey’s greatest weakness. She’d nearly gone over to the dark side there and then, swearing she’d not only cut his arms and legs off but cut them into very small pieces afterwards. She drew her lightsaber immediately. Within moments she and Kylo’s blades were spinning and clashing together as though no time had passed since the last time they’d seen each other.

They stopped once they were too exhausted to do more than glare at each other, out of breath, lightsabers sagging in their hands.

“I can’t stand the sight of you any longer,” said Rey. “We’ll finish this tomorrow. Don’t try anything smart. Artoo’ll be watching you.”

“Don’t you try anything either, scavenger. I’ll have droids watching you too.”

They’d stumbled away from each other to sleep. The next morning they fought again with leaden limbs. Nobody won. The third day, their muscles were so stiff that they could do little more than stagger around in slow motion.

Over the weeks of their interminable and increasingly boring conflict, Rey’d had time to think.

Now she persisted with her new plan. “We can have half the island each.”

Kylo showed his teeth at her in a tired snarl, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. He looked as tatty as her, the tail-ends of his tunic shredded where they’d caught on the rocks and his hair stiff with salt. His thick locks flopped over his face in the annoying wind. Too vain to cut them, Rey guessed. She swiped at the ends of her own hair that flicked her in the eye.

“You think I’m vain?” Kylo replied to her thought. “You’re hanging on to your weird hairstyle too, I notice. I can’t imagine why.”

“Set one foot over that rock ridge and I’ll give you a haircut you’ll never forget,” said Rey, lifting her lightsaber.

“Same goes for you,” Kylo said. He sounded as though his heart wasn’t really in it.

The next morning Rey saw that Kylo had spent the night making a line of stones from the sea up to the rock formation on the peak. He must have got tired before finishing, though, because it petered out after that.

“Two can play at that game!” she said aloud, in case he was hiding behind a rock nearby. Who knew, with that creep? They’d both mastered the art of concealing their Force signature weeks ago. “When I finish this, you’d better be on your side of it.” She drew herself up and called on the Force. It took most of the day, but it was satisfying work, imposing some order on Ahch-To’s overgrowth of rocks. She finished on the beach opposite to where Kylo had started.

Kylo came strolling as if by accident around the next headland. Rey ignored him and planted a stick into the sand at the end of the line. She decorated it with a knot of seaweed so it looked like a head on a pike. Kylo sneered his snaggle-toothed sneer but didn’t say anything, so she had no excuse to talk to him. The meaning of the line of rocks, completed by her, was clear enough.

Still, his non-reaction was strangely annoying. Rey stomped back to Luke’s hut, where Artoo greeted her with a screel of binary. No Kylo activity to report within the network of sensors he monitored, he told her.

No sign of Luke and the Millennium Falcon either.

“Well, keep your eyes peeled, Artoo. I really need to sleep,” she told him.

The next day both of them moved their sensor perimeter to cover the line they’d built dividing the island in two, and that was it. Nothing more to be done.

It wasn’t a bad division. Rey had Luke’s hut. She could fish and tend his vegetable patch.

Kylo had his crashed ship. Presumably it kept out the rain and had supplies.

But it got boring. Artoo might have two generations’ worth of Skywalker stories to tell, but translating them from binary gave Rey a headache. She couldn’t listen for long. Luke had kept a datapad that served as a kind of daybook. It reminded Rey of what needed doing: when to lay traps for flatflounders during their annual migration, when to sow mangelseeds, when to harvest trun’ and how to store the tubers she dug. It told her how to prune the scraggly trees that seemed unlikely to bear much fruit (but what a miracle if they did! Rey watched them anxiously, waging a war on their insect pests as energetically as she did against Kylo).

Except the Kylo war was now at a standstill. Rey had time to meditate (she ticked it conscientiously off her list every day) and work on the vegetable patch, which she did until every leaf glowed with health. Nobody ever said she couldn’t use the Force on plants, so she tried it. _I am one with the rising sap,_ she said, feeling foolish. _I am filled with light and vigour from the healthful sun._

The fruit trees started to look less scrofulous, so perhaps those hard lumps on their branches would turn into sweet, delicious fruit after all.

 _Ah, my worthy adversary, the Jedi tree-whisperer_ , came Kylo’s thought in her mind. She’d let her guard drop on the bond between them.

 _Get lost,_ she thought. He went, but not before sending her an image, or a sensation. Biting down into some juicy velvet-skinned fruit, its sweet, zingy flavour exploding over his tongue. Juice running down his chin. Rey licked her lips reflexively but tasted only the salt left on her skin by the sea breeze.

In the evenings Rey ate her meal in silence next to the little lamp that gave off heat. Artoo hummed quietly, keeping watch over the network that would alert Rey if Kylo crossed the line they’d built. She brooded over Luke, trying to remember everything he’d taught her, and wondering where he was. Why he’d gone.

One of her conversations with Luke kept coming to mind, as she sat alone in his hut staring into the lantern, or on fine nights when she sat on the doorstep looking at the stars. They’d been fishing and had made a driftwood fire on the beach. Luke showed her how to grill their catch. As they ate, she’d asked Luke when they were going to go after Kylo.

“What do you mean, ‘we’? One of us will go after Kylo. One after Snoke.”

“Why? Wouldn’t it make sense to tackle them as a team? Two against one?” she’d asked.

Luke sighed and looked into the fire. She watched the flames’ uncertain light playing on his careworn face. He was so different from the vigorous galactic hero she’d expected to find.

“The Jedi said they would bring balance to the Force,” he said, but he gave her a questioning look. Some conversations with Luke tested her knowledge. Since she had little knowledge, she’d learned to proceed with caution.

“That’s what people say,” she said carefully.

“How did they do that?” he asked.

“By fighting the, um, Sith and other dark siders,” she replied.

“Be more specific.”

“I don’t know!” she said. “They, um, tried to defeat the Emperor? Darth Vader?”

“Yes and no. The problem is not that they opposed them, it’s that they tried to conquer the dark side.”

Rey stirred the fire with a stick while she thought about it. “So that wouldn’t be a balance, I guess. One side defeating the other.”

Luke gave her one of his rare smiles. “Exactly. To oppose is one thing. To defeat is something else.” He held up a warning finger. “Mind you, this is my personal belief. I have had little training, and Yoda, who trained me, came to feel that he and his fellow Jedi had been wrong for most of their lives. They didn’t live long enough to come up with anything better. I’ve had time to think about it, alone here on Ahch-To. But I could be wrong.”

“So two light-side Force users against one dark-sider wouldn’t bring balance, you’re saying?”

“Right. The further you kick the pendulum in one direction, the harder it swings back in the other. It’d be nice to live in a Golden Age of goodness and light, but the suffering you get on the backswing is too extreme.”

“It’s a wonder anyone does anything,” Rey had said bitterly.

“Life wasn’t meant to be easy,” Luke had replied.

“True enough,” said Rey. “From what I’ve seen, anyway.”

So now here she was, trapped on Ahch-To with Kylo Ren. She hoped Luke was pursuing Snoke, but she didn’t know. After the first few days she made a resolution not to let the mystery eat at her, no matter how much Kylo mocked her and tried to undermine her confidence.

* * *

 

Part of the vegetable patch took advantage of a sheltered hollow near the island’s summit that served as a suntrap. It was close enough to the rock line for Kylo to talk to her without crossing the border.

“My, you work hard,” he said, popping up after a few days of non-contact.

Rey ignored him.

Kylo remained where he was, chin propped up on his hand, leaning on one of the stones. A sensor droid kept its beady electronic eye on him, but as he did not cross the line, it did nothing more.

“You work like a slave,” he said.

Rey ignored him even harder.

“You know, people with our Force talents don’t have to stand in the hot sun shovelling bird shit over crops. In the First Order you’d be treated with respect. It’s a good life.”

Rey straightened up and met his eyes at last. “Except for those times Snoke sent you to Moraband to starve and nearly die of thirst.” She’d spied on his thoughts enough to pick out that memory.

“That’s training,” he said. “It’s how you get stronger. Being tested mentally and physically.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rey quellingly. He left, after watching her dig for half an hour.

* * *

 

Luke’s datapad suggested it was a good time of year to wash the bedding, as the weather was improving. Rey hauled the sheets and covers down to the beach below the hut. Luke hadn’t provided any further data on how it was done, so she laid the bedding out to be washed by the waves, stamping on them for good measure. Then she hung them over some driftwood racks to dry in the stiff breeze before going off to look at her garden. Some form of caterpillar had parachuted in overnight on weird silk globes. She knew of no Force power that could remove them any quicker than she could by squashing them with her fingers. It was tedious and uncomfortable work, bent over the seedling plants.

She was interrupted by a yell from down near the beach. She straightened up, her back and knees clicking with relief. Somebody — Kylo — was waving something white over on his side of the demarcation line. She picked up her saberstaff and trotted down the nearest path towards him.

"What’s the white flag for?” she shouted as she got closer. “I don’t want to talk to you!”

“These are your sheets,” he answered, his deep voice easily carrying over the rumble of the sea below.

Rey clenched her teeth in annoyance. He was right. The wind must have picked them up once they were dry, and sent them over the line. She stomped up to the stones near where he stood, the sheets now bunched and draped over his arms. He swatted at a surveillance droid that got too close. She did the same to one of his droids. The damn things were annoying.

Instead of handing her the sheets, he dropped them and held a pillowcase out to his side, waggling it so it flapped in the breeze.

“Do you know how they catch bull elephoths?” he said, grinning. “They wave a piece of cloth to annoy it so it will charge at them, and then they step out of the way” — he demonstrated with a graceful sidestep and a twirl — “and drive a tranquilliser dart into its side as it charges past.” He made a dancer’s leap, flourishing a piece of driftwood and driving it into the pile of washing.

Sometimes he was all knees and elbows going in every direction, but when he focused, his limbs snapped into tautly disciplined lines, suddenly graceful. She’d noticed that about him before.

Rey realised she had her mouth open, and shut it with a snap. “Give me that!” she said.

He waved the pillowcase at her invitingly. “Come and get it.”

“You’re not funny.”

He sighed, picked up the bundle of dry sheets and held them out to her. “Do you even know how to have fun?” he asked.

“Fun? With murderers, thieves and traitors like you?” she said, very distinctly. “No.” She’d used this line on Kylo at least a dozen times, but it never got old. “But I’m sure it’s all fun and games on your side of the border.”

“I play dejarik,” he said, sounding hurt.

“Who with?”

“Me.”

“I bet you cheat,” she said.

“Yes I do, but so do I.”

Rey gave a squawk of laughter before she could stop herself. Kylo grinned a lop-sided grin back at her.

She shouldn’t even know what his smile looked like.

His onboard computer must be completely dead if he couldn’t even use it to play dejarik. It also explained why she’d seen him standing nearly motionless on his beach for hours at a time, taking an occasional step to move something on the ground. In fact from where she was standing now, she could see how he’d marked out the lines of a dejarik board in the sand.

It was pathetic.

“What do you use for pieces?” she asked, despite herself.

“Rocks.”

Ah yes, rocks. That good old Jakku stand-by. She’d had any number of rock toys when she was a child.

Rey couldn’t think of any reason for further talk, so she picked up the pile of bedding he’d dumped on the ground.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, because she was a Jedi and therefore always the bigger person. She made her way back to her hut.

After dinner and meditation, she found herself thinking of dejarik. On Jakku she’d played with other scavengers and traders. She’d always loved the pieces, that spoke of a wide-open galaxy full of exotic creatures. But she’d never had her own set. On a whim, she ignited one blade of her saberstaff and clamped the handle in a vice on Luke’s little worktable. She picked up a flat rock next to the door and passed it carefully over the blade, changing the angle so the spitting plasma could shape it. As she harnessed her Force energy to the blade, it stopped squalling and cut the stone neatly.

With this tool, she couldn’t really carve dejarik’s game pieces. But all over the galaxy, players used symbols to represent each piece if they didn’t have a holo set. Over time, those symbols had become a shorthand for the real thing.

Rey’s first attempt was a flat disc with a V-shape and two dots: A Ghhhk, with its triangular horned skull and its eyes.

Her next ones were neater, and she learned how to make the curved designs more graceful. The last pieces, she thought, might be almost beautiful, with a bit of polishing. The rocks revealed unexpected veins and specks of different colours.

* * *

 

It rained, and Rey stayed inside watching the rain plastering down the grass outside her hut’s doorway. A drop of water formed on the lintel, swelled slowly, dripped onto the doorstep. _Two-hundred and five_ , she counted silently. Drop number 206 started to form.

Not far away, she sensed Kylo doing the same. She could even see his view out the hatch of his spaceship, if she shut her eyes and let down her guard. Rain sluicing off the broken sensor wing of his ship and hissing onto the grey stones of the shore.

 _Boring isn’t it?_ said his voice in her head.

 _It’s very meditational,_ she said, and tried to pretend she’d been meditating. Though of course Kylo could tell she hadn’t. She couldn’t meditate for sixteen hours a day and neither could Luke. When she’d arrived on the Millennium Falcon, she’d sensed how Luke struggled daily with his desire to _grab that ship and get the kriffing hell out of here!_

Now along the Force bond she could tell Kylo was thinking up some hurtful comment about her being abandoned by the people who were supposed to care about her. But for some reason he turned aside from the thought.

He said only, _Well, who can blame him?_ She felt his rush of misery about his broken ship and his yearning to blast into the sky. For a moment both of them imagined it together — the controls fitting comfortably in their hands, the toggles flicking crisply from “off” to “on”, the power surging through the ship’s systems, making a dead hunk of durasteel into a living thing eager to fly at their will.

 _No I couldn’t fix it,_ she thought, before he could ask. _I’d need spare parts._ Before they’d divided the island, she’d spied on the ship as much as she could, hoping to steal it. But it was wrecked beyond any hope. _Where would you go, anyway?_

She caught images of the Finalizer and a memory of Starkiller Base. _Whoops! Strike that one! The Finalizer, then._ She got a glimpse of grey corridors, hard surfaces, and a bedroom furnished entirely in black.

 _That looks so much better than here,_ she thought sarcastically.

Kylo’s answering thoughts seemed uncertain. _It’s powerful,_ he offered. _Orderly._

She shut him out.

The hut was small and the dejarik tokens cluttered up her table. She moved them to the floor, but then she had to step around them. When the sun finally came out a few days later, Rey gathered the stone pieces into the heavy synthetarp bag she used in the garden, and carried them down to the beach. She used the Force to loft the dejarik pieces into a pile on Kylo’s side, next to the flat patch of sand where he’d marked out his playing board. The rain had washed it clean, of course.

The next day she went down to gather shellfish. Her morning of wading and rock scrambling ended at the beach next to Kylo’s dejarik board. He’d made a new one, several metres across, and was brooding over it. He caught sight of her and waved, then pointed at the pieces she’d made and gave her a thumbs-up. She jerked her chin in reply. _No trouble._

“Who’s winning?” she shouted.

“Me,” he said, with a grin.

He made no other move. Rey climbed up higher to get a better view. After a while she saw that the monnok was unprotected on its left flank. Kylo wasn’t doing anything so she used the Force to move Grimtaash onto that square. She gave Grimtaash’s token the spin and wiggle that meant he’d used his hind claws to attack, then the reverse spin to show he’d made a grab with his big three-fingered hands.

Kylo sprang into action, bringing across his Kintan Strider and Mantellian Savrip in a series of moves so fast that he must been waiting for Grimtaash’s move.

“You had that set up so I’d be tempted into the game.” She felt a flash of annoyance at falling for it.

“Women always figure out the truth,” said Kylo ruefully.

He’d figured her out, but she’d figured him out too. Plus, she could see how she could bring the K’lor’slug into the game to bamboozle the Savrip. She moved the piece with a wave of one hand.

The game lasted until midday, when Kylo won by a whisker and a swipe of a Savrip’s club. Rey laughed — his winning move was a bold one, and unexpected —then she stopped herself.

She gave Kylo’s victory a lazy salute to show she didn’t care. He beckoned her over from her perch above the game. She hopped down and towards the border they’d built, then stopped. What was she doing, playing dejarik with her enemy? She had a sack of shellfish that would start to smell soon. She hefted it and turned to go, but Kylo called her name.

It was impossible to make out his face against the sunstruck bay behind him, so she trotted a few steps closer.

“What are those?” he pointed to the sack.

“Shellfish.”

“What, you eat them?”

Yes. Didn’t you….have you been here all this time and you haven’t found out you can eat these?

“What are they like?”

“Delicious!” said Rey. _Or they were at first_ …she was rather over-familiar with the taste by now. “Here, trade you. You give me some carbo bars or whatever you have, and I’ll give you these.”

“How do you cook them?”

“Throw them in boiling water. The shells will pop open. After five minutes, they’re ready to eat.” She looked up at Kylo. He was looming over her as she crouched by her sack of shellfish. He could have taken advantage of her so easily. Kicked her in the face while her head was down, fishing out a choice specimen from the bag. Knocked her off her feet as she squatted on her haunches. But the current of Force between them was tranquil. She didn’t feel any threat from him at all.

She stood up, shading her eyes to see his face better. He gave her an unexpectedly shy smile with only half his mouth. Perhaps the other half didn’t dare.

“Here.” She held out the sack. “Give me the sack back, though.”

“Wait here, and I’ll bring you some carbo bars.” He turned and strode off, jumping easily between the boulders that jutted out of the tough island grass.

Rey waited by the demarcation line until Kylo bounded back into view, swinging the sack. He threw it and she caught it. Felt the weight, which was quite adequate. Looked inside and recognised the familiar golden wrappers of the galaxy’s most common carbo bar. _An acceptable trade,_ she thought.

Of course, she should be on her guard. Up until now, neither she nor Kylo had been able to count on any backup if one did succeed in capturing the other. But what if reinforcements _had_ arrived for Kylo? What if a First Order ship was in orbit now, waiting for a signal to say Kylo had captured her? Then surely it would be logical for Kylo to get her off-guard. Make her lower her defences. She would have done the same.

 _How do I know this isn’t a trap?_ she said, leaning into the Force bond to search his mind for any shadow of deception. But nothing in him flinched. He appeared happy to stand there and stare at her. Looking into his mind was like seeing herself in a mirror. Quite a flattering one too. Rey backed away, mentally and physically.

In the physical world, Kylo merely shrugged. “Enjoy the carbo bars.” He turned and walked away. After a while, Rey started up the hill to her hut. Before Kylo disappeared around the rocky outcrop at the end of the beach, she shouted, “I know how I could have stopped your Savrip now!”

“Tomorrow, then!” he shouted back, and sprang out of sight. His Force signature sparkled briefly. Rey shook her head as though it might dislodge that image.

Still, the morning had gone…rather quicker than usual. She almost skipped up the long stairs, already imagining the delightful crunch of a carbo bar, and its sweetness dissolving between her teeth.

* * *

 

“So they play dejarik on Jakku too? Who taught you to play?” Kylo asked the next morning.

He’d redrawn the dejarik board closer to the line of stones, where he could sit on a rock and use the Force to move his pieces. Rey was perched on the sandy bank above the beach on her side of the line, doing the same. The beach was cupped between two outcrops of wave-rounded stone. It was quiet on this windless day, apart from the small clicking of insects that lived in the sand-grass.

Rey studied the board, thinking. “Constable Zuvio. He was the head of the local militia. When I was very little he and the other Kyuzo warriors let me stay in their station sometimes. They played dejarik a lot.”

She smiled. Zuvio had been a good person. Rey thought of his headquarters as the house where justice lived. Zuvio could easily have used his position for his own benefit. His unit was loyal to him, and they had enough weapons and influence to make the law be whatever Zuvio said it was. But for some strange and fortunate reason, he lived by an unshakeable moral code. One that had rubbed off on Rey, if truth be told. “I think he was once a member of some warrior order,” Rey said.

“Why was he on Jakku?” asked Kylo.

“Some kind of punishment. He did something bad, and his order sent him to Niima Outpost to work off the crime. He once said all he knew was how to protect justice, and he was too old to learn new ways,” Rey said.

“Atonement,” said Kylo, and his attention was withdrawn from her so abruptly that Rey felt it like a snap in the Force. She studied his face, fascinated by how it betrayed him: tiny movements chasing each other around his long mouth, his eyes narrowing and darkening. All his teasing, his ironic humour, barely served to keep him afloat over those depths: an ocean of pain. She observed him a moment longer, then sent her Kintan Strider hopping over his Savrip.

He snapped out of his reverie and sent Grimtaash hunkering over to her Savrip in response.

“Unkar taught me to play too,” Rey said.

“What? Unkar Plutt, the junkmaster?” said Kylo. “He didn’t seem like the type!”

“He got beaten up once by an offworld trader gang. We had no bacta on Niima. There was nobody he would trust to take care of him, so I did it. We played dejarik to pass the time.

Rey moved her Savrip over a few places. “How did you know about Unkar, anyway?”

“We had an intelligence briefing before we went in. Who’s who on Jakku.” Kylo seemed pleased by his accidental rhyme, until he caught the look on Rey’s face.

“Tuanul village,” she said flatly. “Who _was_ who in Tuanul Village? Or were they _all_ targets, the women and children too?”

His eyes grew black as he stared at her. For a moment he was naked to her in the Force bond, and she flinched away from the bitter shock of it. He turned on his heel and walked off, savagely kicking the dejarik pieces out of his way.

 _Well it’s not as if we were going to be friends_ , she thought to herself. _Not with that murderer, thief, traitor…_ but the familiar words had lost their savour. Impossible to feel righteous when she’d seen so far into his unguarded mind. Under the pain, the trapped-animal despair, the rage that kept him moving forward through his empty days, there was a hollowness more terrible than Rey’s loneliest nights on Jakku.

* * *

Late spring must be the wet season for this latitude. Luke’s datapad had no comment on the seasons, but the rain spoke for itself. Everything on the island bowed its head to the constant downpour. Over in his wreck (and she did appreciate the irony that her old tormentor now lived in a wreck, as she once had) Kylo existed in a black cloud of his own making.

It rained until Rey had no feelings any more; hate and anger dwindled to boredom, and then even that washed away. Rey offered up her clear, empty soul to the grey sky. It gave her more rain, and a Force connection to the land under her feet, with all the hopeful life and growth coiled within it.

In all her days on Jakku, she had never thought herself unwanted. Somebody had told her, or she had come to believe, that she was left there for her own protection. The reason must remain a secret, “classified”, even from herself, who might unwittingly reveal it to the wrong person. All her life she’d imagined her parents in danger — perhaps on the run from the law, or from criminal gangs, or a vengeful family opposed to their union. But whatever happened, she’d been left on Jakku because she was precious, to them if to nobody else.

But Kylo…

He didn’t believe anyone wanted him back.

At night, she had to wall herself off from the Force bond, from his dreams of falling, falling, falling. Catching at his father with one flailing hand and always missing, _I didn’t mean it, come back!_ and learning that gravity would make no exceptions, not even for a dark lord, or whatever Snoke had promised he would become.

In another of Kylo’s dreams, Han’s body fell into all-consuming light, and Kylo was left alone in the dark on the bridge to nowhere.

He deserved that pain, didn’t he? It was nothing compared to the pain and terror of the Tuanul villagers, in their last moments. But as the days passed in her lonely hut, she began to feel that she’d fallen short of what a Jedi should aspire to.

“Don’t be so smug,” said Leia in another dream, this one Rey’s own. Leia faced her for an instant, her eyes flashing, and Rey was bewildered by the mixture of grief and irritation and love she read on her face. Kylo was her son, Han was the love of her life. What _should_ Leia feel?

Love was not always a soft thing.

One evening the rain cleared. Rey went up to the crest of the island. High clouds caught the last light of the day, making bars and feathers of rose and gold against a sky of darkly sumptuous blue velvet. One day she’d fly again through all that beauty. It was hers to love, and the sea too, fading to infinity at the horizon.

Far below, Kylo was an insect dot on the beach, listlessly moving through the forms of some lightsaber drills. On an evening like this, when all the sky belonged to Rey, he was too small to hate any more.

Atonement. It was something Kylo was never going to achieve or even attempt while he brooded alone, abandoned to his own self-hatred.

Rey rewired her saberstaff so one end became a fine cutting tool. She selected the brightest of the rainwashed rocks she could find. She made small dejarik tokens, polished by her little blade’s brilliant edge. They fitted easily in the hand and made a satisfying clacking sound when she scooped them into a little bag and went out into the rain.

A cloud of Kylo’s security drones clustered around Rey as soon as she crossed the line of stones. She strode on, ignoring them, until she could see the silhouette of Kylo’s ship rearing against the dull sky. Painful to look at: it would never fly again.

Kylo came loping down the ramp, a shadow within the shadow under the hull. He ignited his lightsaber and its red light illuminated his face.

“So. It has come to this at last,” he said grimly, and waited, poised to attack. The red blade thrummed in the air. “We might as well end this.”

“Here, catch!” said Rey, flinging the bag at him.

He caught it reflexively. Gave her a hot, unreadable look, then tucked it under his lightsaber hand so he could reach inside with the other.

His face changed as he realised what was inside the bag. Rey let out a breath she didn’t realise she’d been holding, seeing his eyes widen and soften. Seeing the way his lips parted on an unspoken word of surprise. He looked up at her and they both froze for a moment.

Then he switched off his lightsaber and said, “Might as well come out of the rain.” Turning his back on her, he mumbled something about carbo bars as he retreated up the ramp.

She smiled and followed him.

 

* * *

It was warm in the cabin. Rey stripped off her wet outer things. Kylo took them and threw them in the ship’s refresher, which had a hot air cycle.

Now they were sitting across a small table. Rey had a carbo bar in one hand, one of the hard kind that took time to gnaw through. With her other hand she was marking out a dejarik board into the table with her sabrestaff’s short blade. Kylo kept looking at her and looking quickly away, or his eyes would slide to her bare shoulders, the neckline of her undershirt.

“I’ve never seen a lightsaber used that way,” he said. He took the dejarik pieces out of their bag, one at a time, running his fingers over them. “Did you use it to make these too?”

Rey nodded. “It’s good for a lot of things,” she said. “Pruning trees, metalwork…” She looked up at sound from Kylo. He was boggling at her.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head, almost laughing. “You never cease to amaze me. Nobody does that, Rey. Except you.”

“Why not? It works really well!”

“It’s meant to be a lightsaber, not a light-pocketknife. What did you do to it?”

She showed him. She’d fitted a little cover that flipped up to expose a dial she’d designed. It could adjust the blade’s length and width.

It took courage to hold the hilt of her lightsaber up to his inspection. She watched his reactions through the Force bond, wary of a sudden grab. But she sensed nothing but respectful interest from him.

He seemed remarkably unlike an enemy. Even so, Rey sat nearest the open hatch, in case she needed to leave in a hurry.

 

* * *

 

The wind blew gusts of rainy air into the stuffy cabin. Kylo opened their game with some showy moves that hid a subtler strategy. Rey laid the groundwork for a counterstrike. In the first half hour she learned that both of them were good at setting traps. They lost a few pieces early on before finding their rhythm. Rey found herself settling into the pleasure of a good contest. She felt Kylo do the same.

“The Grievous Gambit,” he murmured at one point, in response to her move. “Where did you learn that?”

“Some spacer who was trading at Niima. I didn’t know that move had a name.”

A little later, Rey said, “I didn’t know a Kintan Strider could do that!”

“Han said they could.” Kylo dropped the name in casually, but Rey could sense the tension behind it.

“Did he teach you to play?” said Rey, equally casual. Though she, too, felt as though she was playing with live ammunition.

“No. Chewie did,” said Kylo. Rey gazed at him until her obvious curiosity coaxed a few more words out of him.  “Han didn’t have much patience. We only played dejarik once I got good enough.

There was a world of bitterness in those words.

“Didn’t he like kids?” asked Rey, astonished. Han had called her “kid,” and she’d sensed no contempt in the word.

“He liked people who could look after themselves,” said Kylo carefully. She could hear his thoughts anyway, laced with jealousy. _So of course he liked you straight away!_

“Not right away!” said Rey, casting around for something to counter Kylo’s envy. “He was going to throw us off the ship in an escape pod at first.” And not just at first, she realised. Even _after_ they’d proved themselves against the rathtars. _If I hadn’t had BB8 and the map…_

Kylo’s long mouth twisted wryly. He seemed almost amused. Kylo could probably overhear her thoughts. “That is kind of terrible, now I think about it,” she said wonderingly. “I can’t believe I forgot that…”

“Nobody ever called him fair,” said Kylo.

“Did he take you around with him when you were older?” said Rey, to change the topic.

“Sometimes.” Kylo stared unseeingly at the dejarik board. Then he brightened. “I remember one time we were smuggling drugs to a warlord. Not just a tough guy but a real showman. He used to get his followers drugged up so they’d have visions and work themselves up into a frenzy for him. So, there was a big political rally planned and our client needed the drugs to put them in the mood. We were late and they’d started without us… It was all very secret too, with just his branded followers allowed in the hall. But Dad got us in by pretending we were searching for a mystical cure.”

“Cure for what?” asked Rey.

“Our awful afflictions,” Kylo said, snickering. “Han found some kind of makeup that made us look like our skin was flaking off. Of course Dad hammed it up….I was his poor sick child, and he was desperate for me to have the great man’s blessing. I had to writhe around and groan a lot.”

Rey laughed, trying to imagine it.

Kylo went on, “But even once we were in the hall, we couldn’t get near the leader. He was up on a stage, addressing the crowd. It wasn’t going very well….they’d been promised an unforgettable evening, and so far it was nothing but talking.”

“So what did you do?”

“Dad had the drugs in the kind of ornamental box you keep relics in. As we were elbowing our way through the crowd, he pretended to trip so it fell in this firepit at the front of the hall. We had enough drugs for a dozen rallies, and the whole lot went up in smoke.

“In five minutes, there were about five thousand people yelling and pointing at invisible things and chanting and dancing around. We had filter plugs in our noses so we weren’t affected, but even so I’m amazed we got out alive.

“Once we reached the _Falcon_ we got away as fast as we could. Which wasn’t very fast. The same problem that had made us late stalled us before we could get into hyperspace. As we were trying to fix the drive, this huge fancy ship came screaming up from the planet after us. We thought we were finished.”

“How did you escape?”

“Oh, that ship wasn’t there to arrest us. It was sent by our buyer to give us a double payment. Apparently it was the best meeting he’d ever held and he couldn’t let us go without rewarding us. He won the election, too.”

Rey was still smiling when Kylo sent his Houjix across the board so it took her Monnok. He’d planned out a series of moves while telling his story, and now he laid them out one after another. Rey quirked an eyebrow at him to show she knew what he was doing, and countered him with the moves she’d worked out while listening to him. He gave her a quick grin. Her pieces put up a feisty defence, but he beat her anyway.

* * *

 

They played another game. This time, Rey took the offensive sooner. It was a long game, and Kylo’s shoulders slumped more and more as they played. When Rey won, she saw his knuckles whiten on the edge of the table. All his laughter, his sardonic humour, barely served to keep down the darkness in him. He was still the man that had captured her once, held a lightsaber like a burning brand inches from her unprotected face.

“Nobody likes a sore loser, Kylo,” she said, her hand straying towards the hilt of her lightsaber.

Kylo got up abruptly and made tea with unnecessary force, slamming the cups around the galley. “My dad used to say the same thing.”

“Maybe he was right.”

Kylo came to a halt, hands braced on the bench in front of him. His shoulders sagged. Then he took a deep breath. “Maybe sometimes,” he conceded. Then Rey, watching his long, fierce profile, saw his lips move again.  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, so softly she might have missed it.

“It’s only a game,” said Rey.

Kylo concentrated on the tea.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” she said, shrugging. “At least losing at dejarik isn’t serious. You live to fight another day.”

“Living to fight another day. Sometimes I wonder if that’s such a good thing,” he muttered, staring past her at the rain hammering down outside the hatch.

“Tired of life?”

He shot her a glance. “What are we doing here, Rey? Call this life? Just dragging on here, day after day…”

“So, we both failed. You were meant to capture me or kill me, and I was meant to become the next Jedi and capture you. I’m sure we’ve disappointed a lot of people. Sometimes life’s like that.”

“It’s easy for you!” he said. “All you care about is survival.”

“It’s better than being dead,” she said. “This isn’t such a bad place.”

Kylo stared pointedly at the rain. “It’s a miserable slug pit of a planet.”

“What? How can you say that?” Now it was Rey’s turn to boggle at Kylo. “Have you seen those little things with the wavy purple hair in the rock pools? They build tiny castles! And the little silver darting ones that hide in the seaweed? The grass on the hills, too, have you noticed how it has these blue flowers? Some of them are  pink, in the early morning, then they all change at once!” She swept her hands through the air, trying to describe how magical it looked. “Then the sea, it changes too. It changes colour all day!”

Kylo stared at her as though the words tumbling out of her mouth were the most alien thing he’d ever heard. “You’re so used to being alone,” he said. “It doesn’t bother you.”

“Being alone is, well, it happens. It’s part of life sometimes,” she said.

Kylo looked uncomfortable. She’d hit a nerve. Kylo, on his own, and hating it…

“Why hasn’t Snoke sent anyone after you?” she asked suddenly. “He must have noticed you’re missing.”

He gave her a sharp glance, and the mental link between them became opaque. His lips twitched as if he would speak, but he said nothing.

Rey made a sudden guess. “You can’t hear Snoke, can you? You’re used to hearing his voice in your head, but he can’t reach you here.”

Kylo became very still. Rey went on, musingly. “No wonder Luke stayed here. He knew Snoke had to be hunting for him. There must be something on Ahch-To that kept him hidden. You should have thought of that, before you came flying over here to catch me. Your master doesn’t know where you are.”

Perhaps it was pride that silenced him and made him look away, leaving Rey with nothing to observe except the way his improbably thick lashes almost brushed his high cheekbones. One eyelash was sticking out and she had a stupid urge to stroke it into line with the rest before it could fall into his eye and annoy him.

“You thought to catch me and show me off to him?” she asked, without anger. “A surprise gift?”

“It would have made me a success, in his eyes,” said Kylo. He sounded as though he were talking about somebody else. _Things Kylo Ren might have done to please Snoke._

“In his eyes,” she said. He met her gaze then, with the dark flash of some passion she could not read. She refused to look away. There were little flecks of gold in the depths. She leaned in to see better.

“What?” he said.

“You have an eyelash in your eye,” she said hastily, and reached over, greatly daring. Kylo reared back, nostrils flaring like a wild animal about to bolt.

 _Who hurt you?_ she thought. He must have caught it through the bond, for he became still again, hunched over. What suffering he had endured, he hid from her, but the planes of his face hardened into mask. All pride and stoicism. Rey held out one finger, slowly, gently. Stroked it over the one eyelash that had come astray, and drew it away down his cheek.

It stuck to her finger and she held it up for him to see before blowing it away with a little puff of air. Kylo’s gaze lingered on her lips.

* * *

 

They played dejarik every day. Every afternoon it became harder to leave. They began to eat their evening meals together. As the weather improved, there were other things they could do. Rey showed him how to harvest shellfish. Kylo helped her turn the soil for new planting. They worked together, and the silences between them became comfortable.

Yet there was always that awkward moment when the day ended and it was time to part. As she made her way back to Luke’s hut, Rey knew Kylo’s eyes followed her out of sight. She was too stubborn to turn back, even though she knew she would spend all night remembering everything about him. The easy play of his muscles on his long torso as he worked. His changeable mouth, his sinewy hands, the strange gold flecks in his eyes, his rare smile. He must know how she imagined those hands on her, pulling her close. She hugged herself and imagined it was him, running his fingers over her bare skin.

He knew, but he would not beg. His guilt lay like a stone between them, and it was beyond her power to remove it. It was as much as she could do to speak of it.

Until one day she couldn’t stand it any more.

They were kneeling opposite each other, weeding Luke’s vegetable patch, and the question came out of Rey’s mouth unbidden.

“Why did you do it? Did you hate your father that much?”

“I hated that he couldn’t save me.” The answer came so quickly that Rey knew he must have rehearsed it. Like their games of dejarik, where they already had their moves prepared.

Kylo’s voice was low and intense. “Since I was a child, I had visions. Han didn’t want to know about it — about any of it. Every night I fell so far, in the dark, alone. Only Snoke was there to catch me. Nobody else, just Snoke. He showed me how I could control the Force so one day I wouldn’t fear it.

“In the end there was just this one thing blocking me from everything Snoke promised me. If I could only cut myself free, Snoke would be there, still waiting for me. He was my future.”

Rey waited, watching him. His long hair fell over his face in a heavy curtain, and he looked only at his hands, busy at their work. “Is that what you believe?” she asked.

He yanked out a couple of weeds, strong fingers bunching and tensing among the roots.  “Not since coming here,” he said quietly. “But I can’t undo any of it.”

“Your mother wants you back, you know”

“That’s what Han said,” he whispered.

Rey reached over and pulled his hand away from the soil. He gripped her fingers tightly and raised his eyes to her face.

“I can never make it right,” he said.

“One thing at a time,” she said. “If you ever get off here, there’s something you can do.”

“You mean I should go to my mother,” he said hoarsely. “I have to, don’t I?” He stared out past the nodding grasses, past the wide open sea, the endless sky, and slowly his face took on the stillness of resolution. He breathed in sharply at last and gave a short nod. “I can do that.”

His face, when he looked at her again, seemed ten years older. A man’s face. “I’m tired of being afraid. Even if she…even if they kill me…one way or another, it’ll be over.”

Rey squeezed his hand but said nothing. She couldn’t make any guarantees, and he’d put his trust in the wrong place too often already.

Then his look darkened again. “But then there’s Tuanul village…”

Rey bowed her head. Finn had described it to her, and she could feel the horror of it from her bond with Kylo too.

“With my mask on, I could block out most of what happened. But I saw enough,” said Kylo. Through the bond, she could feel the compulsion that had driven him, Snoke’s will like a rod of burning iron through Kylo’s spine. She blinked away sudden tears.

Kylo put his head in his hands. “Don’t. You can’t think that. I spoke their death sentence with my own mouth. I won’t pretend otherwise.”

Rey reached out to lay her hand on the top of his head. “Maybe there were survivors?” she asked tentatively. “Their families?”

She could feel Kylo shaking his head under her hand. “They’ll want me dead.”

“It won’t be easy,” she murmured. Tugging gently on his hair, she pulled him up to meet her eyes. “They say the people at Tuanul worshipped the Force. You’ve been its greatest servant, and they’d respect that. If you offer something... I don’t know. Some help.”  

“What good could I do?” said Kylo, his voice ragged.

“You’re not powerless, you know...”  

His face twisted. She took it between her hands, smoothing away the lines of self-loathing. “They know the Force isn’t only light.”

He stilled under her hands for a long moment, staring into her eyes. “I think our job, you and me, is to find our own way. People want to use the Force, to use _us._ The Force won’t tell us what’s right.”

He pulled free of her grip and stood up with sudden energy. With a flick of the Force, he knocked over one of the nearest stones in the wall they’d built. They both watched it bounce down the long slope to the sea until it launched itself over a bluff and was lost to sight.

“We should take down this whole wall,” Kylo said.

“No, leave it.” Her eyes traced the crooked line that climbed up from sea to peak. “It was well-done work.”

Kylo stood looking at her, hands hanging loose, at a loss.

“There’ll be other walls to take down. It’s something we can do together.”

Kylo looked at her for a long time, taking in her meaning. “Undoing. Building…” he said at last, and nodded.

It took one careful step over the row of hopeful seedlings for Rey to put her arms around him. He felt solid, like a wall, if a wall could heave a sigh and grow arms to encircle her. She hugged him fiercely. His chin rested on her head, and it felt trustful. He was too big to lean all his weight on her, but this little bit, he would allow.

“I suppose a ship will come for us, sooner or later,” he said.

“The Resistance knows I’m here,” she said. “They’ll come. We just have to wait. You’ll see.” Smiling, she reached up to hook her fingers around his long, thick hair, combing it back away from his face. “You have dirt on you,” she said, and rubbed her fingertips in gentle circles over his cheekbones, just as she’d longed to do for so many weeks.

Kylo’s smile formed deep curves of delight under her fingers. “So do you.”

He flicked off a crumb of soil from the tip of her nose and then leaned in closer to lay his lips gently on her brow for a moment.

“We’ll wait together,” she said. She pulled herself out of his embrace and led him over to the wall. They sat with their arms around each other, dangling their legs in the gap he’d made in the line that was supposed to divide them.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write about letting go of anger, about living alone, and about living within nature. So I dedicate this story to James K Baxter’s High Country Weather.
> 
>  
> 
> _Alone we are born_  
>  and die alone;  
> Yet see the red-gold cirrus  
> over snow-mountain shine.
> 
>  
> 
> _Upon the upland road_  
>  Ride easy, stranger:  
> Surrender to the sky  
> Your heart of anger.


End file.
